Afterimage

by Roderick Geiger

  They were dumbfounded. No one moved.

  “And,” Ishue added, pointing at Blackburn…“you don’t ever lock me in a room again.”

  “Out of the question,” Blackburn said with a wave of his arm and finality in his voice.

  She ignored him. “I’ve already written and filed the Robbins/magnetosphere/action-reaction story. It’ll run tomorrow morning unless I can call my editor before six p.m. In order for me to convince him to hold the story, I’ll have to be able to sell him a much better story. Is everyone following this?”

  They all nodded robotically.

  “Good. I think in the next day or two we’ll have that much better story. Please know that I do not intend to paint you guys in a bad light. I’m not a tabloid writer. I’m just here for my Pulitzer, that’s all. I’ll stay out of your way. I’m a fly on the wall.”

  There was a brief pause while all eyes turned to the CEO. “I like her,” Gyttings said. “Let her stay. The story will break in a couple days anyway. Besides, we kind of owe her a debt of gratitude. Her Thursday story turned some of the spotlight away from us and dumped it on the federal government.”

  “You agree to let her watch the next test?” Chalmais whispered.

  “Why not?” Gyttings said. “It’s likely to be our last anyway.”

  “And what about the oceanographer,” Chalmais tried to whisper.

  “Yeah. We better talk to them first, find out what kind of comm equipment they’ve got down there. See if we can set up a video-conference; our scientists, their scientists….”

  The CEO turned to Ishue and extended his hand: “I guess we have a deal. But you’ll have to agree to respect our restricted areas. You’ll have an escort within the facility…for your own safety, of course.”

  “Of course.” She nodded and they shook hands.

  Day 1

  Saturday

  Gyttings-Lindstrom Research Unit,

  Eugene, Oregon

  Ishue did not really want to call her editor to kill her Robbins story because there was no Robbins story. She hadn’t filed it. She hadn’t even written it. Threatening Chalmais and the others with running the story had been a hastily-constructed bluff, a necessary lie to insure they didn’t try contacting Robbins directly.

  She checked her cellphone again, walking around the tiny room, then into the tiny bathroom. It was now just seven minutes to six. She knew Blackburn and his goonsquad were watching her every move. No signal.

  5:57 p.m. She picked up the room phone and pressed nine for an outside line. Several suspicious tones sounded, then a click and a dial tone. Ed pulled night editor duty on Saturdays two weeks a month. She was praying it would be him on the other end.

  “City desk.” It was!

  “Ed, it’s Ilene…”

  She could almost hear is ire rising: “Miss Ishue! It’s one thing for…”

  “Please, Ed, don’t say anything more!”

  Maybe it was the tone of her voice, the tone that said Okay, I know I bullshit you all the time, but I’m really, really not bullshitting right now. He stopped.

  “I’m inside Gyttings-Lindstrom. This call is being taped, so just nod and say ‘yes, Ilene,’ and nothing else.”

  There was a pause: “Yes, Ilene.”

  Ishue breathed out the breath she’d been holding in. “I’m the only reporter on the inside, Ed. I’ve got a promise for an exclusive after their big test coming up tomorrow or the next day. Ed, this is the human subject test, the main event. They’ll let me observe it if we keep a lid on it…”

  “Yes Ilene.”

  “We won’t try and patch together a ‘pre.’ Okay?”

  “Yes Ilene.”

  “And Ed. We have to kill the Henrique Island story…the story I filed this afternoon?”

  “The Henrique Island story?” he said quizzically.

  There was a pause, and Ishue wanted to cross her fingers, but she couldn’t because Blackburn was watching her from one of those little smoke-tinted domes in the ceiling. Come on Ed. Come on!

  “Well, you know we had the Henrique Island piece ‘skedded’ for page one above the fold. But we can kill it if you promise me something better. Something much better.”

  Bless you, Ed, you smart little shit! “You won’t be sorry, sir.”

  “And I want you to check in with me by 10 a.m. tomorrow or I put the Henrique story on the wires.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And take care of yourself, kid. I want you back in one piece. We miss you around here. Really.”

  A moment after Ishue replaced the receiver, a male voice drifted down from a ceiling speaker, requesting her attendance in the conference room.

  Seven hundred and eighty-five miles south, all alone in the newsroom, Ed Hawthorne surfed through Google listings containing the words ‘Henrique Island.’

  By 7:45 p.m. the conference room was ready. The 144-inch, wall-mounted LED monitor displayed the inside of a ship, a large, square table flanked by countertops, heavily reinforced windows above. It was daytime there, gray overcast. A man came into view wearing a white, naval officer’s hat. He maneuvered around the table, at once seeming to stumble a little.

  Working with Dr. Galtrup, Ishue had helped establish an encrypted satellite link for this video meeting, a connection to a ship exactly halfway around the world. This is as far away as two people can get on earth, she thought, and as soon as she thought it, she realized it was technically incorrect since they were at sea level, and she was a few hundred feet above. The earth isn’t perfectly round, either. “Hello. Can you hear me?”

  Nothing happened. She waved her arm. “Hallo!”

  In the middle of the word the man turned. “Allo. Yes. Who is there?” Again he seemed to lurch, slightly out of balance. It was odd, watching him stumble without seeing the motion that caused it. Of course! The camera is moving with the ship. The man sat down. An attractive young girl entered from the right pulling cables attached to a laptop, her eyes never once leaving her computer screen.

  “I’m Ilene Ishue. Can you hear me okay?”

  It took three seconds for him to answer. “Allo Ilene. So you are the famous writer! I can hear you just fine, Ilene, but we have a long delay, yes? I am Rene. Captain Rene Rachete. And this is Ravinder, our meterologiste” She gave a little nod but did not look up.

  “Why so long?” While she waited for a response, two more people came into view, a man and woman, both middle aged, carrying electronic equipment and stacks of manila folders. They too had to catch their balance from time to time. They both sat. Someone by the camera was tossing cables across the table to them.

  Rachete held up two fingers. “We are using two satellites, 50 - maybe 60,000 kilometers from me to you.”

  “I thought light traveled at 186,000 miles per second,” Ishue said.

  “This is true, but the signal, it is, uh, entrave at many points along the way, you see?”

  Galtrup and Gill came back into the conference room, each carrying well-stocked trays of food. Hungry boys. On the screen, Schiffer plugged her laptop into a flatbed scanner and looked up: “The speed of light? Yes, that’s one of the subjects we want to discuss.” Gyttings and Sara came in together and sat together. “How soon before you’re ready?” Schiffer asked.

  “Momentarily,” Gyttings said, then barked some muffled commands into his cellphone.

  Chalmais, Blackburn and two plainclothes security men entered. Ishue wondered if they had guns. You guys packin? The two head scientists from Superscan came in, followed by Adel and her guard.

  “We’re ready,” Gyttings said. He nodded at the two security men who turned, shut the doors and took up parade rest.

  Bracing himself against the counter, Devon worked his way around the table and sat. Dr. Arnaud followed.

  “You have rough seas there?” Gyttings asked.

  “Always.” Rachete answered. “Two – three meter swells. But the wind is low. It is a nice day, relatifment.”

  A quick ro
und of introductions ensued, a flurry of advanced degrees, professional credentials and mysterious acronyms, followed by several rounds of obligatory courtesies like: “Oh, I read your paper on blah-blah,” and “Didn’t you work with Dr. so-and-so on the yadayada?” Ishue couldn’t keep up in her notebook. My recorder better be getting this. She did not like the idea of relying on audio recording technology.

  Now Schiffer started in earnest: “Let me apologize in advance for using such unscientific terms as ‘a lot,’ and ‘not that much,’ but I’m afraid that’s what we’re reduced to out here. Our instruments were never designed for these kinds of extremes. Our magnetometers, our spectrometers, our microwave interferometers, all worthless. About the only instruments that work are mechanical compasses, which stop pointing magnetic north and point right at the center of the REME. We’re finding ourselves making up new terms and new rules as we go along.

  “I’m sending you a copy of the exact times and locations of the last four REMEs. This should confirm a direct link to these phenomena and your experiments.

  Fumbling with his reading glasses, Gill perused Schiffer’s message. “I see here your chronometer readings are in microseconds. Ours are in milliseconds. But yes, the times would seem to match quite exactly.”

  Galtrup was on it immediately, looking over Gill’s shoulder.

  “Yes,” Gleason said. “The U.N. International Monitoring System uses microsecond accuracy for chronologic triangulation.

  “This can’t be right,” Galtrup said, punching keys on his calculator. “These should be at least 50 milliseconds off.”

  Schiffer responded with long sweeping nod of her head. “Exactly. We first encountered the problem here when we noticed that our undersea hydroacoustic receiver and the NOAA-7 satellite had failed at precisely the same instant. I’m sending that to you now.”

  “How ‘bout the layman’s version,” Ishue suggested.

  None of the scientists seemed to notice the request until Sara repeated it.

  “We have a paradox here,” Gill answered. “Two events, 12,000 miles apart, which occur at exactly the same moment. There’s no lag time. No time for the energy, which caused one event, to get to the other. Do you see?”

  “The implication is that these two events cannot be related,” Galtrup added. “Because, there would have to be lag time between them if they were related.”

  “I’m going to put something up on your screen,” Gleason said, working on his laptop, “which would seem to confirm that your experiments in Eugene are causing the REMEs down here.”

  A picture of earth, taken from perhaps a million miles away, began to form on the big monitor. “This is a computer simulation from NASA’s magnetosphere observation satellite SOHO II, taken just before the last INFX experiment.” A gossamer teardrop shroud formed around earth, many times larger than earth, with the tail pointing away from the sun’s light. Suddenly the image re-formed with what looked like a giant glass rod skewering the planet, wildly distorting the shroud, like a cue stick rammed through a basketball.

  Gleason’s voice: “SOHO makes 16 images per minute. These distortions appeared on only one image, the one coinciding with your experiment.”

  After the initial “oohs” and “ahhs” they watched in silence as the image pixeled back to the Argyle interior. “What does NASA say?” Gyttings asked.

  “They apparently missed it when it happened,” Gleason said. “Now that we’ve brought it to their attention, they have no comment. But they’re pretty freaked-out.”

  “Keep in mind, it’s just a computer animation, made by data SOHO collects,” Schiffer said. “But the fact that the rod of distortion penetrates the planet at Eugene, Oregon, and comes out here, in the South Indian Ocean, combined with the timing of the event, we see as positive and conclusive evidence that the one caused the other.”

  “I concur,” Galtrup said. “If we’re willing to accept that the energy burst from INFX defies relativity theory.”

  Gill seemed anxious to offer: “This obviously takes us far beyond exonerating Gyttings-Lindstrom for the disappearance of Constance McCormack. This - I think - goes beyond even Dr. Deverson’s grandest expectations. We’re pushing our science to its limits here, and I think we must consider the potential for irreversible damage if we proceed with another INFX.”

  This caused a significant level of discomfort among the scientists; the equivalent to joking about bombs at an airport.

  “Yes, of course we must have a risk assessment before we proceed,” Dr. Arnaud said patronizingly.

  “We should be able to provide that in a few hours…” Devon said.

  “As head of this project, I need assurances,” Gill said sternly. He turned to Gyttings. “Sir, your company - you - all of us will be held accountable for any property damage or loss of life resulting from this research. I don’t know that your pockets are deep enough to survive a passenger liner sinking, a tsunami on the Madagascar coast, an additional six degrees of global warming…”

  Gyttings turned slowly to the camera. “What about that?”

  Devon answered, using a cursor on a map as a visual aid: “Uh, except for a few seasonally-manned research stations, at Crozet, Kergulen and along the Antarctic coast, this entire area is uninhabited. Henrique, the only full-time station, is now fully evacuated. Further away, on the southeast coast of Madagascar, and here, along the exposed South African coast, we’ve simply not had any reports of any disturbances that might correspond with any past INFX. As you can see, it’s 2300 kilometers-plus from the REME epicenter to these inhabited areas.” He clicked off the map and smiled condescendingly. “No reported tsunamis. Most of the energy in a tsunami would tend to dissipate over that kind of distance.”

  “So the real problem is shipping,” Chalmais said. “If we clear the shipping lanes of traffic…”

  “We can divert ships from the area,” Devon said.

  “This is an entirely unpredictable event,” Gill said meekly.

  As knowledgeable as Devon was, he was still just a student. Just a kid, Ishue thought. She needed to hear it from the scientist in charge. Among the Argyle contingent, Dr. Schiffer seemed to be that person. She was sitting in the middle of the ship’s table, Captain on one side, Gleason on the other. She’s the key “Dr. Schiffer? What do we know about these REMES? Have they done any damage so far, caused any loss of life?”

  “Actually not. Some waves, some minor injuries, no deaths.”

  “Since we know exactly where the event will occur, I don’t see any serious repercussions,” Gleason said. “If you’re prepared to do another INFX, I think we can prepare for another REME.” He looked at Robbins, then at the camera.

  “What about the SOHO image?” Gill almost pleaded to Gyttings. For the first time he noticed how Sara was sitting next to the CEO. A little too familiar. He’d tried calling her room several times last night, and again this morning. No answer.

  “That image is only a computer animation,” Schiffer reminded. “It looks a lot scarier than it is.”

  Gyttings leaned forward. “How much time before the storm hits?”

  Again, the two-second lag. “We should have good visibility until noon,” Ravinder said.

  “Can we get it together that fast?” Gyttings asked, glancing at Sara.

  “No way,” Gill said.

  “We are in direct line with the Roaring Forties here, which peak in the afternoon hours,” Ravinder said. “We should have good weather here tomorrow morning…perhaps 24 hours would be enough time for your preparations?”

  “We haven’t decided we’re going to do the experiment, have we?” Gill asked incredulously.

  “Perhaps we would benefit from the opinion of a non-scientist,” Gyttings mused. “Ms. Ishue?”

  “Me?” Surprised, she turned to face the others. “I’m deeply appreciative you’ve allowed me to attend this meeting…but when you ask for an opinion…well, I’ve spent so much effort trying to be objective – trying not to have an opin
ion – your asking for one really pulls me out of my element.” She looked at Gyttings. “The prudent move would of course be to let the story out now, let the world community decide whether or not to proceed.” She laughed nervously. “The down side? Nothing will ever get decided. And don’t get the idea you’ll be able to run another experiment when it all dies down, say in a year or two. Not when all the Senate investigating committees, international organizations - and don’t forget us journalists - get through with this. They’ll tie INFX up in debates that will outlive us all. No politician, no private investor, no public agency will ever touch it...”

  “Let’s not forget the ‘X effect,”’ Gill interjected, waiting for their attention, “…the factor no one thought of, the thing that always bites you on the ass because you didn’t think of it beforehand.”

  “Thank you for that, “ Gyttings smirked. “Okay, it appears fate has brought this little group together for the purpose of making a monumental decision. No one of us can do it alone. I would not presume to question how or why each of you has found your way here at this precise moment in history, but I feel confident we’ve assembled the right individuals to arrive at the right choice.” Now, on both sides of earth, the silence was profound. But short-lived.

  “I say yes,” Schiffer said. Gleason nodded.

  “There’s plenty of time to clear the area,” Devon added.

  “Shouldn’t you people be consulting with the U.N.?” Gill asked. “Or the French government?”

  Arnaud answered: “Why? They will just say no.”

  “We’ve got to do it,” Galtrup said. “We’ve got a ‘faster-than-light’ hypothesis staring us right in the face. I know my team up at PNNL would want us to proceed.”

  “Why?” Gill asked.

  “Well, some of our pulse compression experiments have…developed an anomaly that might be explained by…”

  “Anomaly?” Schiffer said. “What anomaly?”

  “And if you don’t mind,” Ishue added, “What is a press compulsive whatever-you-said?”